The boomer blog roundup is a collection of like-minded blogs
cooperating to share their best stories of interest to the Baby Boomer
Generation.
With spring gardens abloom and vegetables being planted,
boomer bloggers are writing about job hunting, midlife challenges, what’s wrong
with 20-somethings, air conditioned tours in Dubai, how you may perpetuate your
own shame, age related-risks for dehydration, and the importance of consumers reviewing their 401(k)s if they're on automatic pilot.
In addition to my blog, other members of the Best of Boomer
Blogs are: The Midlife Crisis Queen, Sightings Over 60, Arabian Tales and Other
Amazing Adventures, So Baby Boomer, Blue Blinds Media, and Tao Flashes.
Be sure to check back next week to see what baby boomer
bloggers are thinking and writing about.
Copyright 2013, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist
Is your
401(k) is on autopilot? If so, it may be time to take a look at it.
A
growing number of employers are adding automatic features to workplace
retirement-savings plans, which usually add new employees into the plans and
set workers’ contributions at 3 percent of pay.
Eleanor
Laise, associate editor of Kiplinger’s Retirement Report, said automatic 401(k)
saving features aren’t a fail-safe way to retirement success.
Laise
offers these suggestions:
Budging from the 3 percent
default rate –
Workers can always opt out of the auto-savings features, but they usually
don’t. On the plus side, the automation leads many who would otherwise save
nothing to steadily sock away a slice of their paycheck. But the 3 percent
default doesn’t come close to the savings rate needed for a secure retirement:
roughly 12 percent to 15 percent, according to financial planners.
The benefits of smarter
automatic features –
A jump to a 6 percent default contribution produces significant improvements in
retirement success rates for workers across income levels. With the higher
default contribution, nearly three out of four workers in the lowest quarter of
income levels would be on the path to a secure retirement, compared with just
62 percent under current default contribution rates.
Why employers are hesitant to
make the change
– No legal barrier exists to making the change, and the most commonly cited
employer objections aren’t insurmountable. Some argue that employees can’t
afford higher savings rates or that the cost of the employer matching the
contribution is an issue.
A
Vanguard study found that workers earning less than $300,000 contribute 50
percent more, on average, when left to their own devices in voluntary 401(k)
plans. And, employers could restructure the current match program so that the
higher default rate would cost them little or nothing and, at the same time,
give workers an incentive to save more.
Laura Lee Carter, the Midlife Crisis Queen, has been taking a week off and doing
some reading for pleasure. Here is her
assessment of the new Debbie Reynolds memoir: ”Unsinkable.”
With Mother’s Day nearing, Lisa Garon Froman, of
Tao Flashes, offers an honest portrayal of her time as a Helicopter Mom in “An
Ode to Motherhood.” It’s a bittersweet account of her memories and regrets.
This week, John Agno, of So Baby Boomer, gives a primer on
annuities: With a typical annuity, a
customer hands over her retirement nest egg to an insurance company in exchange
for a promised future stream of payments. The insurer invests the money and
gets to keep any earnings beyond what’s guaranteed to the
policyholder. If the bets backfire and the insurance company fails, some losses
may be borne by customers and state guarantee funds, which puts boomers at risk.
My tips for baby boomer consumers this week are on giving donations to help
others through crowdfunding. While these websites are established to allow
solicitation of money for a variety of purposes, the organizations or individuals
who get the funds aren’t necessarily charities. Some contributions may not be
tax deductible, the websites usually take a percentage of the donation ranging
from 5 to 20 percent, and you may pay processing fees.
Be sure to check back next week to see what baby boomer
bloggers are writing about.
Copyright 2013, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist
The boomer blog roundup is a collection of like-minded blogs
cooperating to share their best stories of interest to the Baby Boomer
Generation.
With half of the country covered in snow in late
winter-early spring snowstorms, baby boomer bloggers are writing about fraudulent
tax preparation schemes, midlife change, 57 percent of U.S. workers
reporting less than $25,000 in total household savings/investments excluding
their homes, how trying to be “cool” leads to destructive behavior, and the
philosophies of Lao Tzu in “Tao Te Ching.”
Be sure to check back next week to see what baby boomer
bloggers are thinking and writing about.
Copyright 2013, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist
Learn more
about the biggest scams of 2011 –
Did Facebook try to give you $1 million? Did you see the video of Osama bin
Laden’s death? Did you get a middle-of-the-night call from the hotel front
desk? These all were on the BBB’s Top Ten Scams of 2011 list.
Scammers
also were at work on tricking consumers about job offers, sweepstakes and
lotteries, social media and dating, home improvements, check cashing, e-mail
offers, sales, mortgages, and investments.
I’m the host for this week’s Best of Boomer
Blogs #296.
The boomer blog roundup is
a collection of like-minded blogs cooperating to share their best stories of interest
to the Baby Boomer Generation.
As we experience the last
throws of winter, boomer bloggers have a lot on their minds.
Tom Sightings of Sightings
Over Sixty just got home from his Snowbird trip to Florida. In his article,
“It Drives Me Crazy,”
he relates some of his experiences on the road. Hint: Stay away from
Washington, D.C.
Laura Lee Carter, of the Midlife Crisis Queen, writes that perhaps you
didn't know, but you have the option to become more optimistic at any age, and
there are many benefits. Let Laura Lee teach you what she's learned about the Science
of Optimism and Resilience.
This week
the United Arab Emirates
newspapers reported that users of TripAdvisorranked the Sheikh Zayed
Grand MosqueNo. 16 on the list of the top most talked
about attractions in the world. It joins the ranks of such iconic
global sites as Sydney Harbor, the Coliseum in Rome, the Eiffel Tower in Paris,
and Central Park in New York City. Arabian Tales Katie Foster explains what makes this mosque so special.
On my blog, I let consumers know about two big corporate
settlements:
Transocean Deepwater Inc. pleaded guilty to a violation of
the Clean Water Act for its illegal conduct leading to the 2010 Deepwater
Horizon disaster and was sentenced to pay $400 million in criminal fines and
penalties.
After nearly five years of litigation, a settlement was announced
on behalf of investors totaling $688 million in class actions against Merck
& Co. Inc., Schering-Plough Corp., and Merck/Schering-Plough
Pharmaceuticals.
Be sure to stop by again next week to see what our baby
boomer bloggers are writing about.
Copyright 2013, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist
After
nearly five years of litigation, a settlement was announced Thursday on behalf
of investors totaling $688 million in class actions against Merck & Co.
Inc., Schering-Plough Corp., and Merck/Schering-Plough Pharmaceuticals.
These
two actions stem from claims that Merck and Schering, which merged in November
2009, artificially inflated their securities by concealing information and
making false and misleading statements about the anti-cholesterol drugs Zetia
and Vytorin, attorneys for the plaintiffs said in a statement.
The
plaintiffs alleged that even though the defendants knew that a clinical trial
of Vytorin, called “ENHANCE,” demonstrated that Vytorin, a combination of Zetia
and a generic statin medication, was no more effective than the cheaper,
generic statin drug at reducing artery thickness, the companies championed the
“benefits” of the drugs, attracting billions of dollars of capital in the
process.
Yielding
to public pressure to release the results of the ENHANCE trial, the plaintiffs
alleged that the companies reluctantly announced that the cholesterol drugs
showed "no statistically significant difference" in plaque buildup,
and that news of these negative results and their related consequences caused
sharp declines in the value of the companies’ securities, resulting in
significant losses to investors.
The law firms Bernstein
Litowitz Berger & Grossmann and Grant & Eisenhofer represent the Merck
class. Bernstein Litowitz and Labaton Sucharow represent the Schering class.
Among
the plaintiffs are the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System, Public Employees'
Retirement System of Mississippi, Louisiana Municipal Police Employees'
Retirement System, Jacksonville Police and Fire Pension Fund, and General Retirement
System of the City of Detroit.
Copyright 2013, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist
Ads during Sunday’s Super Bowl cost an
average of $3.8 million for a 30-second spot, up from last year's $3.5 million.
The 2013 offerings, like last year, showed scantily clad women and people being
slapped and knocked down.
Adding to the violence of the ads and the
game of football itself were ads for movies, such as “Ironman 3,” and TV shows, such
as “How I Met Your Mother,” which showed hitting, punching, slapping, and
explosions.
At halftime, Beyoncé wore a skimpy costume,
as did the couple of dozen of women who performed with her. Then she writhed
around on the floor of the stage. The performance added to the sexist
atmosphere of the Super Bowl.
I did like one
ad: Dodge, in advertising its Ram
pickup, offered an ad about the importance of farmers, narrated by Paul Harvey.
Here are my awards for the worst ads airing
during this year’s Super Bowl:
Unnecessary violence:
Two guys in a library whisper,
then fight about what’s best in an Oreo cookie, the cookie or the cream.
The fight spreads throughout the entire library, and the police drive through
the wall to break up the fights.
In an ad for SABMiller Redd’s Apple Ale, a guy
can’t decide what to order, so an apple is thrown at him, knocking him down.
Then he knows he should order Redd’s Apple Ale.
In Audi’s
ad, a teen gets the keys to the Audi to drive to the prom. He marches in and
steals a kiss from the queen and gets punched by the king.
Silliest:
Budweiser’s ad, with the man who
trained a Clydesdale that later broke away from his team of horses during a
Chicago parade to hunt the man down, ranks as silly, in my opinion.
Also silly was Tide’s ad
featuring a salsa stain on a shirt that looked like a football player. Dozens of people came to look at the “miracle,” with the man’s wife
washing the shirt and saying “Go, Ravens.”
A man who loves Doritos
buys a goat who loves them, too. By the end of the ad after the goat has eaten
hundreds of packages of the chips, the guy’s hoarding them and making a
for-sale sign for the goat.
Stretchers, a tennis shoe, shows a man
outrunning a cheetah and tying him up, thus saving an antelope.
Most sexist:
Last year, Go Daddy.com showed two guys
in the “cloud” populated with scantily clad women. This year, it grossed out a
lot of people by showing a sexy model kissing a nerd with awful sloppy sounding
kissing.
In another Go Daddy.com ad, also sexist, wives around the world are harping to
their husbands for not putting their big idea online.
Fiat’s ad slowly panned over a woman lying on the
beach in a bikini was bad enough, but having a scorpion crawl over her? Yuck.
Then, when she sees the car, she stands up and throws off her bikini top. The
scorpion drags it away.
Motorola's cell phone ad features actress Megan Fox in
a bathtub. Two men slap each other and another falls off a ladder looking at
the phone.
A Doritos
ad shows a little girl bribing her dad to play her with a bag of chips. He
dresses up and puts on makeup, as do four of his friends.
Gliden, t-shirt maker, produced an ad showing a man
trying to sneak out after a one-night stand, which included fuzzy handcuffs,
only the woman is sleeping in his favorite t-shirt.
Century 21’s ads don’t show women in a good light either.
A woman is so taken with her new wealth that she doesn’t see that her husband is
choking, a woman in labor demands a new kitchen, and a mother-in-law is so
awful that a groom faints at the altar when he thinks about living with her.
Calvin
Klein’s ad showed a male model in
nothing but underwear for most of the ad. Objectifying men isn’t any better than
objectifying women.
Best Buy’s ad showed Amy Poehler asking dozens of
questions, and making suggestive comments to the sales associate.
In a Coke
ad, a bus full of chorus girls chases toward a giant bottle of Coke, with other
characters. One of the girls shoots a cannon full of something that sounds bad
but floats down lightly at the cowboys. And, a biker, gets thrown up on the
window of the bus.
Kia’s scantily clad women “robots” put this ad in
the sexist category. One of the robots kicked a man, earning it violent points,
too.
While SodaStream
made environmental points showing its machine that carbonates beverages, thus
avoiding using cans and bottles, it wasn’t necessary to have a woman in a
bikini operate the machine.
Most irritating:
Since there
isn’t any drama when you buy a car from Cars.com,
for the commercial, the sales representative gives the two consumers a wolf
cub, then the jealous wolf-mom walks in. Ha, ha.
In an ad for
milk, The Rock races out to the
street in his pajamas to pick up milk. He dodges bank robbers, angry lions, and
traffic jams and ignores a kitten stuck in a tree.
Ageist:
In the Taco Bell ad, a group of seniors leave
the retirement home for a night on the town. While some people thought their
partying was funny, I thought it made older people look ridiculous.
Racist:
In a Volkswagen ad, a white man’s car makes
him so happy he speaks with a Jamaican accent. When the ad was released early,
many people wondered if it was racist.
Dark and creepy:
Anheuser-Busch
announced its new beer, Budweiser Black Crown, with two ads that were dark and
creepy, featuring young, upscale people in dark clothing.
Bud Lite’s ads featured characters
trying to get luck through voodoo. One man carried his living room chair to the
voodoo master, Stevie Wonder.
In the Mercedes-Benz
ad, an actor is going to sell his soul in exchange for a new Mercedes CLA as
well as a rich lifestyle, which includes dating Kate Upton and dancing with
Usher. However, the actor sees on a billboard stating that the price starts
under $30,000, so he saves himself.
Formerly called the Blogging Boomer Carnival, our blog
roundup now has a new name, The Best of Boomer Blogs. It's the #292nd
offering of the boomer blogging group.
The boomer blog roundup is a collection of like-minded blogs cooperating to share their best stories of interest to the Baby Boomer Generation.
This week’s offerings include links to articles on
investment myths, what boomer guys talk about, the effects of soda on health,
travels in Dubai, getting organized, and the search for meaning in midlife.
In addition to my blog, other members of the Blogging Boomer
Carnival are: The Midlife Crisis Queen, Sightings From 60, Arabian Tales and
Other Amazing Adventures, So Baby Boomer, and Life After Marriage.
Be sure to stop by again next week to see what our baby boomer
bloggers are writing about.
Copyright 2013, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist
Most of the week, I've been at home recovering from a cold. However, I still made a few consumer transactions.
My best consumer experience: Working with a new investment
company
My financial planner suggested I roll my IRA over to a new
investment company so I’d have a wider range of investments to choose from.
I told him I wanted no load funds this time instead of
loaded ones. That meant I had to make the buys from various funds myself on the
computer.
The local representative said I could call the company if I
had any questions. I decided to call them and have them show me how to do it.
That worked well. A customer service person walked me
through the steps. It was easy with help. If I had to figure it out myself, I
think it would have been one of those “several-hours-of-computer-frustration”
experiences.
My worst consumer experience: Amazon shipping charges
Today, I placed an order on Amazon.com for three books on
acupressure – two for friends and one for myself.
I picked the cheaper new books for $8.50 each. I thought I
was going to get the Amazon standard shipping of three to five days.
Instead, the books are going to arrive Nov. 27 to Dec. 12.
That’s one week to three weeks and four days.
It was irritating because when you click on the shipping
information to try to figure out what you’re going to get, Amazon’s three to
five day standard shipping menu comes up.
The books are coming from a separate company. Also, no
explanation was given for why the shipping charge was $11.97. Again, Amazon’s
shipping rates came up which didn’t apply to my order.
Sigh. And, so the holidays begin.
Copyright 2012, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist
